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Marian Engel's Bear and Elizabeth Jolley's the Well

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Marian Engel's Bear and Elizabeth Jolley's the Well View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Online University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 1-4-1995 Sexual Gothic: Marian Engel’s Bear and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well Gerry Turcotte University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Turcotte, Gerry, Sexual Gothic: Marian Engel’s Bear and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well 1995. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/64 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Sexual Gothic SEXUAL GOTHIC: MARIAN ENGEL’S BEAR AND ELIZABETH JOLLEY’S THE WELL. GERRY TURCOTTE “There was some connection, some unfingerable intimacy among them, some tie between longing and desire and the achievable.” (Engel Bear) “[P]eople often judged by what they feared or knew existed in themselves.” (Jolley The Well) “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” (Derrida “Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, And Other Small Seisisms”) In the process of retrieving female writing from patriarchal control, women writers have focussed on a number of sites for re-vision. This article is concerned with two areas which have received sustained critical and creative attention. The first is language itself and the possibility for underscoring this “politicized” subject—and here, in particular, the way generic categories such as the Gothic have been destabilized or re-appropriated in order to comment on those “systems” which institutionalize and perpetuate imperialist, sexist or so-called “normative” values. The second is sexuality and the body. Specifically, Canadian and Australian Gothic women’s writings have shown marked interest in expressing the physical side of feminine experience, although, it should be stressed, the two—language and body—are invariably connected. In speaking of sexuality and the body, it is important to remember Teresa De Laurentis’ warning not to subsume such a discussion into a purely “oppositional notion of ‘feminine’ subject defined by silence, negativity, a natural sexuality, or a closeness to nature not compromised by patriarchal culture.” She goes on to say that “such a notion— which simply reverts woman to the body and to sexuality as an immediacy of the biological, as nature—has no autonomous theoretical grounding and is moreover quite —1— Sexual Gothic compatible with the conceptual framework of the sciences of man” (De Laurentis 161). Rather, what is of interest here are those texts which fracture in practice the very expectations governing how the female may be spoken of—imagined—and what, of female experience can (il)legitimately be introduced as the subject of discussion. Indeed, it could be argued that many writers are concerned with expressing what Alice Jardine has called “the acutely interior, unabashedly incestuous exploration of these new female spaces: the perhaps historically unprecedented exploration of the female, differently maternal body” (Jardine 33–34). The expression of women’s physical experience in fiction, moreover, is often presented in quite militant or shocking terms, as though what is being portrayed is designed to antagonize conservative or hegemonic values. One need only turn to Susan Swann’s latest co-production, “Sexual Gothic,” to see how the lurid, the extreme, the flagrant, can be used to create “greater awareness of her and her colleagues’ writing,” and, one could add, of the issues their work addresses (Ross E1).1 This article explores how a number of the above preoccupations, textual strategies and political agendas intersect to common purpose in two rather well-known texts in their respective literary cultures—Marian Engel’s Bear and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well. Specifically, it is possible to argue that the Gothic mode is turned to by many contemporary women writers in order to present in mainstream texts the so-called “unspeakable” experience of women. It could also be claimed that postcolonial writers have found the mode particularly empowering precisely because of the mode’s formal dimensions: formulas are always especially noticeable, particularly when they are being broken. Whether or not second world women writers alter the form significantly from first world writers is a question this article does not address for reasons of space. What can be suggested here is that texts by contemporary Canadian and Australian writers which do engage in re-visions or re-writings of central or canonical texts and forms, invariably problematize Old World certainties. As with most postcolonial texts, these acts of de- stabilization, of abrogation and appropriation, “assert the complex of intersecting —2— Sexual Gothic ‘peripheries’ as the actual substance of experience” (Ashcroft, et. al. 78), and this, at the very least, undermines the feasibility of a reductive “monologism” asserted by totalising systems. It may be useful to consider this a form of counter-discourse in Richard Terdiman’s terms: such acts of resistance, once spoken, even to be silenced, acquire “a phantom but fundamental existence” (Terdiman 14). This claim can also be made for female experiences and subject matter under patriarchy. Indeed, just as postcolonial writers have used the Gothic mode to speak of “national/regional identities,”2 they have also found it useful to “speak” the body. This is not surprising. Gothic texts have always had a tremendous interest in the corporeal and in the sexual; and much contemporary Canadian and Australian writing uses this preoccupation as a way of commenting at once on the values embedded in the traditional genres, as well as to fissure such systems through the introduction of “unsuitable” material which does not conform to or reconfirm dominant values. Engel’s Bear and Jolley’s The Well, deliberately reverse or “corrupt” the orthodox, suggesting new areas of experience and new possibilities for “femaleness,” even though each is careful not to speak of “one” female voice, and each is at pains to define the price which is exacted, still, for such transgressions. It is critical to note, before such a study can begin, that the question of gender is not merely a theme of this paper, but an issue in terms of its very construction as well. As a male, heterosexual critic, the following “readings” of these texts, and of the issues which they raise about sexuality and the body, are fraught with contradictions, investments and biases which need to be foregrounded, even in such a curtailed manner. Writing and criticism can never escape ideology and declaring one’s position does not neutralize perspective; but this is an effort not to obscure the evidence of bias. This article, then, attempts at the very least not to participate consciously in a patriarchal reading strategy, and to generate ways of engaging in counter-discursive strategies instead. Not discussing these issues, as a male academic, would seem to participate in a conspiracy of silence, an evasion of the very problematics which the Gothic, as a mode, specializes in presenting. —3— Sexual Gothic A definition of the Gothic is not easy to give. It is originally linked with ecclesiastical architecture of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, but, during the Gothic Revival of the eighteenth century in England it came rapidly to mean anything unsophisticated and everything medieval. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is its disputed point of origin, and it sees an extraordinary development from that time on, from Anne Radcliffe’s influential novels through to Victorian reworkings of the mode in works as diverse as Caleb Williams and Dracula. The twentieth century has been far from immune to its dark appeal, manifesting itself in a series of guises, from Angela Carter’s unsettling tales through to the Batman and Alien movies. Although the term has been used with remarkable flexibility, so that it has come to describe horror fiction, romance novels and even westerns such as Unforgiven, it would be fair to say that all of these vehicles have displayed “common elements” in “what critics through the ages have seen as gothic.” As Margot Northey has argued, the Gothic can be defined as that which represents a subjective view of the dark side of life, seen through the distorting mirror of the self, with its submerged levels of psychic and spiritual experiences. Non-realistic and essentially symbolic in its approach, the gothic opens up various possibilities of psychological, spiritual, or social interpretation. (Northey 6) This paper is particularly interested in what can be termed the “literary” Gothic, as distinguished from Romance writing, although, as has already been suggested, the differences between modes are far from clear-cut. It would probably be fair to say, however, that Engel’s Bear is very much a parody of such romances, but, as importantly, that it is a rejection of the conclusions which such texts endorse.3 Both Engel and Jolley use the Gothic as a way to celebrate female experience; ironically, it is also true that theirs, like so many fictions which proclaim such a presence, do so in decidedly negative terms. Margery Fee, for example, refutes what is a common critical reading of Bear as a text which shows its protagonist somehow transcending her fractured self and moving, in the words of Elspeth Cameron, towards —4— Sexual Gothic “the integration of an alienated personality” (Cameron 93). Fee argues that Lou’s “resolution is incomplete, as indeed, it must be, given that Lou’s problems, are not simply personal, but also social” (Fee 21). Fee quite rightly maintains that “simply to close off the process, to see Lou’s identity as complete, ‘found’, and ‘integrated’ once and for all is to miss much of the novels [sic] interest for women” (22).
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